Bitcoin Gold is a hard fork of the open source cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The fork occurred on 24 October 2017, at block height 491407. The stated purpose of the fork is to restore GPU mining functionality to Bitcoin, as opposed to specialized ASICs with entry prices in the thousands of dollars.

Bitcoin gold uses a SHA-256 proof-of-work algorithm to the Equihash ASIC-resistant algorithm, originally from Zcash. The Bitcoin Gold team used ‘post-mine’ – a mining of 100,000 coins after the fork had already occurred. The team did this via a rapid mining of approximately 8,000 blocks at 12.5 BTG per block. The bulk of premined coins have been placed into an ‘endowment’, and according to the developers will be used to grow and maintain the BTG ecosystem. However, of the 100K coins, some five percent were set aside as a bonus for the team, or about 833 coins for each of the six members.